LinkedIn announces Business Manager

LinkedIn today announced the creation of Business Manager. The new Business Manager is a centralized platform designed to make it easier for large companies and agencies to manage people, ad accounts and business pages. 

A centralized platform. Business Manager will aim to simplify how marketers keep track of their accounts by offering their Campaign Manager and Pages options easily visible from a central location. Here’s what else LinkedIn Business Manager offers:

• View and manage teams, ad accounts, pages, and business partners from the central dashboard.

• Easier management and control of admin tasks such as permissions and billing.

• The ability to share and update Matched Audiences across ad accounts.

What LinkedIn is saying. “We built Business Manager with you, our B2B customers, in mind to help you maximize efficiencies, so you can create and execute engaging campaigns that cut through a crowded market with no added cost. Early test customers, like GroupM Canada, Merkle B2B, VMware and Xero, saw immediate value from the platform, and we’re excited to make LinkedIn Business Manager publicly available to marketers across the globe in the coming weeks.” That’s according to Gyanda Sachdeva, LinkedIn’s VP of product management.

Launch date. There is no word on when the new Business Manager platform will launch. In a blog post, Sachdeva mentions only “launching in the coming weeks” but gives no exact date. 

First impression of the dashboard. It looks clean and easy to use. But with most new platforms and features, it’s likely to be filled with hidden tools, bugs, and UX design flaws. We’ll keep a close eye on it after it launches.

Read the announcement. You can read the full announcement here.

Why we care. I’ve worked on several LinkedIn ad accounts and pages and the only thing I have to ask LinkedIn is “what took so long?” I avoided managing LinkedIn clients for years because of the unnecessarily cumbersome platform that had been passed off as the LinkedIn ads manager. This announcement elicits a frustrated but relieved “finally!” response that I’m sure many other marketing professionals share. Especially those that work on Google, Facebook, or literally any other marketing management platform with a Business Manager dashboard.